External Users Are Atlassian Accounts Rather Than Portal Only

[Dwayne Hammond]

Hello,

I'm mainly trying to get an understanding of whether this is an old setup causing grief or something I can resolve please.

We migrated from Jira Server to Jira Cloud in 2024 and since then have noticed that some of our external users (unaffiliated customers) have the same display names as each other. This has opened the risk of us accidentally adding the wrong user to a ticket and sharing privileged information with them.

The solution I believe we'd want to use is to edit a customers name as per https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/edit-a-customers-name/ but the vast majority of our users are not portal-only and instead show in our user directory.

After reading https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/manage-jira-service-management-customer-accounts/ I have confirmed that our intended use-case is that ALL external accounts should be portal-only. We have a single Project (SD) that faces outwards with everything else being internal for accounts we manage (internal employees). We have no need for allowing customers access to anything aside from raising/viewing requests (email or portal) and viewing the knowledge base.

As the majority of our customers are already listed in our directory (Customer as the only Product Role) I am under the impression that these are all Atlassian accounts and that there is no way for me to revert these to allow for name edit.

Am I really out of options or have I missed something among the hundreds of past questions on here?

What exactly is the factor that determines whether a new customer who emails us (or is CCd) becomes a portal-only account or an Atlassian account? The only "extra" step we do is add a new email address on an SD ticket into an Organisation through the SD > Customers screen as a lot of our processes are based on the org.

Thanks

-Dwayne

[John Funk]

Hi Dwayne - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

My experience has been that if the user does not already exist in the target site when an import is done, the Jira will create them as a user. 

The trick seems to be that if the user is really only a portal only user, then before the import, you should create them in the target site as a customer which will establish a portal only account (more or less). Then when that user is migrated/imported, they will remain a portal only customer. 

Since that didn't happen and they got created as users, they probably do not have anything associated with them. You should check that for the user and if not, then delete the User and leave the portal only customer. 

There is some direction on merge/migrate a portal only customer to a user account, but I don't believe that is what you want. You want to go the other route, which I am not aware of any process to merge the two accounts.